I want to be able to post microblog style content, and have it cross-post to different platforms (e.g. Twitter, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Facebook) — in a way that is resilient to corporate api hijinx. (Perhaps aligned with the approach/philosophy of this project, getting into browser automation? https://mschmitt.org/blog/save-liked-tweets-without-twitter-api/. Or this approach, based on local device automation?) I also think it would be cool to explore pulling content from multiple platforms and synthesizing them into a single alternative feed — sort of like an RSS for your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Reddit timelines. Again, in a way that is resilient to corporate api hijinx. Is anybody interested in exploring this? I would also be interested in low-energy and low-data/bandwidth approaches to doing this, because that's the world we're moving towards (hopefully)

have you looked into the indieweb stuff? their focus on POSSE seems well aligned with this effort. there are a lot of existing indieweb compatible blogging setups, and many more folks who’ve spun up their home-grown solutions (myself included).

I am familiar with the indieweb stuff, thank you! I am talking about POSSE on one hand — and yet, I'm interested in approaches that are more robust than corporate APIs integrations, especially in the face of API policy changes (e.g. Twitter breaking all of the Mastodon-Twitter crossposters overnight). I'm also interested in apps/clients/extentions that people will be able to use with ease (especially on the non-technical side), given the situation we're all in together.

Any technical solution to this problem is a hack. It will be brittle and subject to legal attacks if nothing else. The only real long-term solution is to move society away from walled gardens. Tell everyone you know, every time they mention anything negative about a walled garden, about the superior open alternatives. Tell them about the joys of a simple reverse chronological timeline, where the vendor doesn't decide which posts to show you first. Tell them about the flexibility and compatibility that comes from open standards. Tell them about how decentralized systems are resilient against corporate censorship. And most importantly, don't ever build your own community within a walled garden like slack. 😉

I used to agree re: push away from walled gardens (see my website with like 5000 posts on it) but lately I’ve been wondering if doing things in the public, while big, centralized players still exists, dooms us to just generate more and more fodder for the centralized beasties? is there another way of “open walled gardens?”

I appreciate that perspective Personal Dynamic Media — at the same time, there are projects like https://github.com/dimdenGD/OldTwitter and Nitter and LibRedirect that have worked well for very long times and have held up. So there are degrees to these things. Gets into what Doctorow describes as "adversarial interoperability / competitive compatibility" — he shares a great anecdote about I think Apple reverse-engineering .doc format, to make it so that .doc was compatible on Apple OSes in the early days, as that was a huge necessity for people. Wanted to share here in case there are any other folks with similar interests in this area.

Wildebeest from Cloudflare looks good.

Wildebeest indeed looks great. I worry about Cloudflare monopolizing the infrastructure of the Internet though

@Eli Mellen No, there's no such thing as open walled gardens. I don't think there's any keeping the big bad out. Someone with more resources can deploy those resources. Either go private or give up on privacy. Even in a private group, nation states will just pay someone in your group or supply chain to get in every so often. If you want to be discoverable, if you want to open yourself up to serendipity, avoiding walled gardens is as good as it gets. You can't avoid others using what you put out. All you can do is ensure you have more robust access to it.

Now, what about making our own walled gardens to keep the big stuff out? I see this as a mostly surmountable issue as long as you walk away from “growth” as a driving factor. Being cozy with a niche enclave.

I know it's boring but manually cross-posting stuff has worked great for me 🫡

@Eli Mellen Cozy is definitely an option. But it also eliminates much of the serendipity that seems to draw people to microblogging. Arguably microblogging is not a cozy activity. I start wondering what "walled garden" means. I don't think it means, "nobody can get in." Facebook has had pretty terrible security at various points in its life, to the extent that other companies were able to crawl vast swathes of it. Rather, in a walled garden information is being created within at such a prodigious rate that it takes a lot of resources for an attacker to keep up. Walls are for the plebes. So "walling off against Facebook" seems like an ill-posed idea. (I'm basically regurgitating https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/07/04/the-fediverse-is-a-privacy-nightmare, except I think the Fediverse is a privacy nightmare exactly to the extent that Facebook or Twitter is. No more.)

I start to wonder what “walled garden” means.

pixel chickadee yes! I think there are 2 things a walled garden is: • a physical (or digital) apparatus of separation (so that there can be an “in” and an “out”) • and a set of “rules” or norms that govern the interior space Gates and gate keeping. So, an alternative: (heavy handed) Lighthouses and ships. The boundary is softer here. There’s not a magic circle (uh, oh, danger term) but there’s a discrete node (lighthouse) that connects the ships — makes them aware of one another and some geography. I think a planet is like this. A thing that connects a bunch of otherwise discrete folks around a common facet — webrings, too